Video Encoding

We do not have the GPU enabled software yet to test the hardware enabled h265 encode/decode features of Maxwell, but the updated NVENC performance for H264 that's in the 2nd gen GM200 based Maxwell chips does work when paired with NVIDIA Shadowplay, which can capture 4K at 60 FPS. We demonstrated this with GTX 980, but thats is more of a 'real time' encoding than an accelerated encoding which some users are interested in.

We tried our usual accelerated tests however which did show some improvement.

Windows Movie Maker WILL encode and render faster with bigger,faster GPUS and will perform poorly, sometimes slower than CPU only on certain integrated GPU systems. The hardware utilisation can be viewed using tools like GPU-Z

WMM is old and pre-dates the newer video engines in AMD and NVIDIA GPUs which need specialist API support to access, however it will 'try' to use whatever is available providing the graphics driver supplies the right CODECs and API access.

How do we know it isn't just leverage the CPU in some way, swapping GPUs on the same CPU does show us the difference in addition to GPU utilisation.

For example from our 5960X Haswell-E review, in WMM A 5960X paired with a GTX 460 which does not have NVIDIA's new NVENC video processor encodes our test workflow in 23 seconds, swapping in a GTX 980 with the same graphics driver speeds this up to 8.5 seconds.

Due to a bug introduced into MediaEspresso which breaks NVIDIA support we could not fully test NVIDIA acceleration, however note the scores for GPU Decode, GTX980 is as fast as Intel QuickSync when told to decode the GPU as quickly as possible, its 2-3x as fast as the CPU doing both the encode and decode. CPU only tests are included for reference.

Some may say this is a GPU review, what is handbrake doing here its a CPU test and you'd be wrong. Both Intel and AMD have dedicated themselves to improve handbrake heavily resulting in the version we have today which includes DXVA (GPU Acceleration) as well as OpenCL and QuickSync support.

Handbrake includes a fine tuned Intel-Dedicated h264 CODEC so other solutions may never be as fast. GTX 960 improves on OpenCL compared to Radeon. Handbrake does not support CUDA.